Beyond Boogaloo: The Weird, Wild and Wonderful World of Cannon's Breakin' Movies

We look back at the franchise that got 1984 breakdancing in the streets.

At this point it seems safe to assume that more people have made jokes about the Breakin' movies than have actually seen them. For decades, smart asses have jokingly affixed "Electric Boogaloo", the notorious subtitle of the second film, to a series of comically unlikely would-be sequels, although in recent years its title as the undisputed king of facetious subtitles has been challenged by such other gloriously specific, evocative subtitles as the Wall Street sequel's "Money Never Sleeps" and The Hobbit follow-up's "The Desolation Of Smaug"

As a longtime pop culture writer, I have joked about the premises of the Breakin' franchise long before I saw them because, in just two wonderfully cheesy breakdancesploitation extravaganzas, the Breakin' series used three of the most quintessentially cheesy dance movie plots ever committed to film. There's the glorious chestnut about a classically trained dancer (in this case, Lucinda Dickey as jazz-trained daughter of privilege, Kelly a.k.a. "Special K") boldly challenging the divides of high and low culture by fusing the movement of the streets with the discipline of her earlier training, but also the cliché of passionate street dancers risking it all for a dream.

Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, subsequently, recycles the convention of plucky, talented youngsters climactically putting on a big show to raise money for a worthy cause in its cornball tale of a group of passionate street dancers (the kind who risk it all for their dreams and also challenge the high-low culture divide) putting on a big breakdancing show to save the youth rec center from being torn down to make space for an evil (i.e white people-engineered) shopping center.

On one level, it makes sense that the Breakin' films would be largely remembered as cheap punchlines and go-to pop culture references for the campiness of the 1980s. As works of cinema, Breakin' and its sequel barely qualify as movies. They're pretty much just dance sequences clumsily stitched together with the shopworn fabric of dance movie tropes that were old back when Busy Berkley was recycling them and positively ancient by the time Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the legendary, Israeli-born and bred schlockmeisters who ran Cannon Films, got to them.

But for movies that barely qualify as movies, Breakin' and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, both released in 1984,are surprisingly fascinating all the same, as Shout Factory's feverishly anticipated, recently released Blu-Ray combo pack of these two films reveals. I'm not sure how Shout Factory managed to wrestle the Blu-Ray rights for Breakin' and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo away from the Criterion Collection, but I'm glad they did, because the movies look and sound great.

The Breakin' movies are remembered for their cheesiness, but it's worth noting thatthe original was an enormous box-office hit. Despite a low-budget and a cast of unknowns, the movie was the eighteenth top grossing film of 1984, just above another surprise hit that would go on to make slightly more of a cultural impact: The Terminator.

From the vantage point of 2015, Breakin' is remarkable for its fluid conception of gender and sexuality. Early in the film, Kelly's sidekick is Adam (Phineas Newborn III), a flamboyant, fellow dancer Kelly affectionately nicknames "Cupcakes" who plays a major role in introducing the lead to the world of break-dancing. He mysteriously disappears halfway through the film. It's as if the filmmakers only realized that prominently featuring a clearly gay character was way too progressive for a hip hop film from 1984 until filming was halfway finished and they couldn't either cut him out completely or continue to feature him as a main character.

Breakin's male romantic lead is Ozone (Adolfo "Shabba Doo" Quinones), a man whose signature fashion statements include a weakness for fedoras, dangling feather earrings and midriff-baring half-shirts. He's macho only by comparison to the other men in the movie, most notably Turbo, his effeminate partner in dance, played by Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers.

Shabba Doo and Boogaloo Shrimp reportedly clashed with Dickey on set, resenting her background in gymnastics. That friction only adds to the weird "Effete man, Women-haters Club" dynamic between Doo, Shrimp and Dickey's characters, and the homoerotic nature of Turbo and Ozone's relationship. In Breakin' the men are flamboyant and the women tend to be aggressive tomboys. Even Ice-T, not exactly a figure synonymous with androgyny, wears what appears to be a rhinestone-studded leather fetish harness that shows off most of his naked torso during one of his scenes in Electric Boogaloo.

Ice-T would go on to fame as one of the first gangsta rappers and, later, as a cop for four decades on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But in Breakin' he's incongruously cast as a party rapper credited hilariously as "Rap Talker," whose electro-funk-fueled ditties extensively reference both the film's plot and its main characters. In Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo he even performs at the climactic big breakdancing show to summarize the film's plot. Though he's referred to as "Ice-T" it's as if it's an off-brand, discarded version of Ice-T, one that was all about getting the party people on their feet rather than tales of criminal bravado, appeared in the film instead of the final, finished version.

For movies released only seven months apart, Breakin' and Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo have decidedly different sensibilities. For all its cheesiness and non-ironic embrace of dance movie conventions, Breakin' is rooted in an actual scene and subculture. As silly as it might have been, and Breakin' is gloriously silly, the film could at least be said to have a foundation in reality.

The only place where Breakin' departs completely from reality is in a standout sequence where Ozone asks Turbo to sweep the sidewalk in front of the bodega where they apparently both work and he acquiesces by fusing breakdancing and sweeping in a way that's as entertaining as it is wildly inefficient. At one point Turbo is able to make his broom stand up of its own accord in blatant defiance of God's laws and the laws of gravity, but otherwise the film eschews deliberate fantasy.

Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo, in sharp contrast,is Cannon's conception of an old MGM musical. It's Cannon co-head Menahem Golan's attempt to reproduce the spectacle and grandeur of a lavish extravaganza from MGM's Arthur Freed unit on a tight budget. As such, it's a candy-colored, unabashedly goofy exercise in escapism filled with cartoonish stereotypes of white people as stiff, disproportionately bow-tie-clad goobers and stiffs.

Depending on whether you embrace the Breakin' films as important, fascinating cultural documents of a seminal moment in street culture when it broke through to the mainstream or as unintentionally hilarious camp comedies, the production number in Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo where the magical power of dance brings a dead man back to life and instantly heals the disabled either ranks as an embarrassing nadir or a wonderfully shameless highlight.

Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo provides the flimsiest of a rationale for the aforementioned dance number where the ill use the hospital's instruments not for their intended medical purposes but rather for executing extravagant choreography by having Turbo tumble down flights of stairs and end up in a suspiciously boogie-friendly hospital. But for the most part, Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo doesn't feel the need to explain its many flights of giddy fantasy, like a scene where Turbo pays homage to Fred Astaire's signature moves in Royal Wedding by moonwalking on the ceiling.

In Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo, Turbo, Ozone and Special K are pied pipers who spread dance everywhere they go, as if blessed with a magical, unseen dance ray that, when pointed in the directions of cops or nurses, instantly transforms them from stiff, white squares into dancing machines. Adorable moppets also figure prominently, as befits a movie about street dancers helping protect disadvantaged kids from cartoonishly evil exemplars of white bread, old-money evil. The filmmakers stop just short of having a puppy parade march through the climactic breakdancing show in their efforts to throw in seemingly everything a mass audience might find appealing.

Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo shies away from the queerness and ambiguity that help make Breakin' so interesting. Turbo spends Breakin' thinking girls are yucky, and seeing them mainly as challenges to his dance floor supremacy. In Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo, however, the filmmakers felt the need to spell out his heterosexuality by having him fall for a fellow dancer and seek romantic advice from his best buddy Ozone.

Though its subtitle would become the series' weirdly enduring legacy, Breakin'2 was nowhere near the success of its predecessor. Despite coming out a little over a half a year after Breakin' debuted, Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo grossed a fraction of Breakin''s box-office haul and despite being in the 18th top grossing film of 1984, Shabba Doo, Boogaloo Shrimp and Lucinda Dickey were seldom seen onscreen in the years that followed, though Shrimp did go on to a strange later fame as the choreographer for the robotic Urkel sequences on Family Matters.

Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo couldn't be more 1984 but from the purview of today, but they fit perfectly within the history of dance movies as the corny but super-fun connective tissue between old-fashioned musicals of the 30s, 40s and 50s and the Step Up movies of today, whose plots, themes and conflicts look an awful lot like the ones found in the Breakin' movies.

The very different responses to Breakin' and Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo reveals something telling about the transitory nature of fads: they're white hot, then ice-cold and seven months were all it took to take breakdancing from the hottest new thing to yesterday's embarrassing obsession. Golan and Globus, whose Reagan-era golden age saw them alternating between art house movies by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Norman Mailer and B-movies from Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson, had an enduring love of fads and trends.

After Cannon ended, Golan and Globus, perhaps reflecting fondly on the box-office gross of Breakin', decided that the world needed not one, but two separate movies about what they clearly saw as breakdancing's heir in the dance-fad department: the Lambada. So they produced competing movies about the dance fad that wasn't in 1990. Lambada was a reunion between uncredited producer Globus, Shabba Doo (who choreographed) and Breakin' director Joel Silberg while Golan embraced new collaborators for his ill-fated Lambada movie, The Forbidden Dance.

Given the deathless after-life of Breakin'2's subtitle there was really only one conceivable name for a documentary about Cannon films and the colorful relationship between Golan and Globus. Sure enough, when Mark Hartley, the director of the acclaimed Ozsploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood, recently made a documentary about Cannon, he called it Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films after a movie that, while it was certainly not the best film Cannon ever produced, represented Cannon's carnival barker, sideshow, huckster sensibility in its purest and most embarrassingly entertaining form.

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